panbient wrote on Aug 6, 2012, 11:54:I always thought The Sands of Time was the reboot for the franchise. Is this a reboot of a reboot? Are we already to the point of crossing that line?

considering the original was made for Apple IIe, it was already a reboot of a reboot.. so they already crossed that line

why is any of this surprising? everything is being rebooted now, especially movies

its because people are fucking worthless .. they have nothing original to add, they just want to leech off the cash cows other people created.. its happening more and more because the only thing they are concerned with is making a buck.. thats it..

so let em bow down before the almighty dollar.. let it replace everything inside them

they deserve it

I'd argue that there are three (primary) reasons for the reboot phenomenon.

One, modern intellectual property rights have gotten so borked that it is almost impossible to innovate. Many really great ideas in the past have come from doing something new or different with an older idea (you mentioned King Arthur, which is a good example). Disney has made billions doing that. The problem is, now that copyright is nearly infinite (and every time Mickey comes up for reversion to public domain, the bought-and-paid-for politicians expand it farther), just about any "new" idea will be close enough to someone else's idea that you have to worry about being sued for it. So big conglomerates endlessly cycle through the old ideas that they know they own.

Two, since almost all of the (American) entertainment outlets are owned by FIVE multi-national corporations, there is so much money involved that the suits who run things are afraid of risks. Better to rehash something that has made money in the past (CallOfDuty 15) than to risk innovating and losing 150 million dollars.

Three, culturally, we are no longer a society of innovators. The entire Western world (US, GB, Europe) has become risk averse to the point where we cannot innovate. When a large portion of the population expects the government to provide for them from cradle to grave, what is the incentive to excel? To experiment? To try something new? At least half of the population of the Western world aren't citizens... they're f'ing PETS.

Look at the response to the Mars rover that just landed. Every story I read had about 50% of the comments expressing stuff like "Why are we wasting 2.5 billion dollars on that? Why not spend that money on the people here?" Yeah, let's spend it on $2.5 billion worth of EBT cards, so that all the welfare queens can squirt out another 3 brats with no chance of being raised to be a productive citizen or a benefit to society. I'd rather burn the $2.5 bil!

A society is either expanding or contracting. Period. There is no historical example of a static culture. Ever. If we are not pushing the frontiers, then we are looking inwards and collapsing. And we have very few frontier-pushers in Western society any more, whether in space or in video games...